The Lochner Era and Comparative Constitutionalism

ARTICLE The Lochner era and comparative constitutionalism Sujit Choudhry* We should be careful to avoid the pitfall of Lochner v. New York which has been described by Professor Tribe... as being "not in judicial interven- tion to protect 'liberty' but in a misguided understanding of what liberty actually required in the industrial age." The Lochner era gave rise to serious questions about judicial review and the relationship between the court and the legislature.... President Arthur Chaskalson, Constitutional Court of South Africa' I therefore reject the application of the American line of cases that suggest that liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment includes liberty of contract. As I stated earlier these cases have a specific historical context, a context that incorporated into the American jurisprudence certain laissez-faire principles that may not have a corresponding application to the interpretation of the [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] in the present day. 2 Justice (later Chief Justice) Antonio Lamer, Supreme Court of Canada Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. E-mail: [email protected]; website: www.law.utoronto.ca/faculty/choudhry. I thank Blake Brown, Roy Lee, and Jo-Anne Pickel for excellent research assistance, Ted Tjaden for invaluable help in securing Supreme Court of Canada facta, Trish McMahon for helpful information, and Bernadette Mount for superb secretarial support. This work was financially supported by the Cecil Wright Foundation and the Connaught Foundation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Budapest, the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Vancouver, and to audiences at the Witswatersrand University School of Law, and the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town. I thank Harry Arthurs, Blake Brown, Victor Ferreres Comella, Aeyal Gross, Sarah Harding, Vicki Jackson, Heinz Klug, Ross Kriel, Dan Markel. Christina Murray, Ira Parghi, Michel Rosenfeld, Theunis Roux, David Schneiderman, Kevin Stack, Stu Woolman, the audiences at those presentations, and an anonymous reviewer, for helpful comments, discussions, and questions. All remaining errors are mine. This article builds upon and extends arguments first presented in Sujit Choudhry, Globalization in Search of Justification: Toward a Theory of Comparative Constitutional Interpretation, 74 IND.L.J. 819 (1999). 1 Ferreira v. Levin NO, 1996 (1) BCLR 1, 308 (CC), quoting LAURENCE H. TIBE, AmEICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 769 (Foundation Press, 2d ed. 1988). 2 Reference Re Sections 193 and 195.1(1)(c) of the Criminal Code (Man.). [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1123, 1171 (Can.) [hereinafter ProstitutionReference). 0 Sujit Choudhry 2004, 1 ICON, Volume 2, Number 1, 2004, pp. 1-55 S. Choudhry The trauma experienced in America as a result of the Lochner case must not bring Israeli law to a standstill. We must, over the course of the years to come, adopt a comprehensive constitutional philosophy.... 3 Chief Justice Aharon Barak, Supreme Court of Israel 1. Introduction Even in the era of globalization, politics within nation-states is still predomi- nantly "politics in the vernacular,"4 stressing the particular features of national political communities. But an awareness of the particular can be sharpened through a process of comparison. In the Indian case, for example, Amartya Sen observes that many nationalist thinkers have sought to identify and distinguish the characteristic features of Indian culture from "the West," a process that is at once "dialectical and largely negative," as a mechanism to strengthen the bonds of the Indian political community s And the differences thus identified need not be cultural, reflecting instead deep disagreement over the fundamental values underlying a basic structure of political and economic rules and institutions. In this vein, the Federalist Papers argued that some features of comparative constitutional experience were to be avoided by the nas- cent American republic. 6 And we should expect to find the invocation of difference, in its various forms, not only across jurisdictions and historical con- texts but also across a variety of institutional settings. The constructive use of comparison should figure not just in public debate but in legal argument as well, as a resource both to frame and to interpret formal sources of law, includ- ing constitutions. In this article, I extend this claim by describing a distinctive mode of constitutional argumentation I term "Lochner discourse." The Lochner era exerts a powerful hold over the American constitutional imagination as an example of the dangers of judicial review. As Ronald Dworkin colorfully puts it, Lochner is 3United Mizrahi Bank Ltd. v. Migdal Cooperative Village, 49 PD. 221, 102 (1995) (unoficial translation), reprinted in LoRRAIa E. WEINm & Tsvi KAHANA, GIoBaL CONsTFuTIoNAIJSM 21-102 (Faculty of Law, Univ. of Toronto 1999). 4 WnL KymucKA, PoLmcs IN THE VmNAcuLAR: NATIONALISM, MuLTcuLTURALISM, AND CrIzENSHnP (Oxford Univ. Press 2001). 5 Amartya Sen, On InterpretingIndia's Past, in NATIONALISM, DEmocRACY AND DEVEWLOPMENrSTATE AND PoLrcs IN INDmA10, 17 (Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal eds., Oxford Univ. Press 1997). Later in this essay, Sen points to the contrast employed by Indian nationalists between Western "materialism" and Indian "spirituality." Id. at 35. 6 FH m ,Aums No. 10 (Alexander Hamilton). The Lochner era and comparative constitutionalism the "whipping boy" of American constitutional law.7 Indeed, much of the edifice of the last fifty years of American constitutional jurisprudence is a reac- tion to, a rejection of, and an attempt to avoid a repetition of, the Lochner era. I want to explore a related phenomenon that has received insufficient atten- tion from students of comparative constitutionalism-namely, the role of the Lochner era in constitutional discourse outside of the United States. Instead of serving as a positive model for drafting and construing constitutional provi- sions, the Lochner era serves as a negative guide to constitutionalism. Lochner lurks as a shadow over liberal democratic constitutionalism, an "aversive" constitutionalism that is framed, in part, by what it is not.8 In so doing, the Lochner era stands as perhaps the paradigmatic instance of an "anti-model" of 9 comparative constitutional experience. I argue that Lochner has three distinct meanings. First, Lochner stands for judicial activism, understood as the constitutionalization of judicial policy preferences; this is the meaning ascribed to Lochner by President Arthur Chaskalson of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, in the context of the interpretation of the constitutional right to liberty. Second, Lochner is synony- mous with economic libertarianism; this is the meaning given to Lochner by Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada, in a case involv- ing the interpretation of the Canadian analogue of the due process clause. Finally, Lochner represents constitutional crisis. This image of Lochner is invoked by Chief Justice Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel, on the occasion of that court's assertion of the power of constitutional judicial review. As an illustrative case study, I focus on the interpretive work done by the image of the Lochner era in Canada, during the debates surrounding the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,'0 and in the jurisprudence and critical commentary that has arisen under that document. Not only has each of Lochner's three meanings figured prominently in Canadian constitutional thought; additionally, Canadian constitutional actors have differed over which aspects of Lochner's legacy are to be avoided. 7 RONALD DwoRRi, FREEDOM'S LAw: THE MORAL READING OF THE AmERicAN CONSTITUTON 82 (Harvard Univ. Press 1996). 8 Kim Lane Scheppele, Aspirational and Aversive Constitutionalism: The Case for Studying Cross- ConstitutionalInfluence Through Negative Models. 1 INT'L J. CONST. L. (I.CON) 296 (2003). 9 Heinz Klug, Model and Anti-Model: The United States Constitution and the "Rise of World Constitutionalism," 2000 Wis. L. REy. 597 (2000). Bruce Ackerman's recent argument that the American approach to the separation of powers should not be relied on by constitutional framers in other jurisdictions is a case in point of this mode of comparative constitutional analysis. Bruce Ackerman, The New Separationof Powers, 113 HARv. L. REv. 633 (2000). 0 1 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982. enacted as Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982. c.11 [hereinafter Charter]. S. Choudhry Although I focus on Canada, Lochner discourse is also present in the constitutional discourse of other jurisdictions, as the introductory quo- tations make clear. Because of the prevalence of Lochner discourse, the Canadian experience offers lessons for the study of the globalization of the practice of modern constitutionalism. In this context, globalization does not simply mean that the commitment to constitutionalism is now widespread. Rather, it implies, in addition, the reliance on comparative material at all stages in the life cycle of modern constitutions, be it comparative jurisprudence in constitutional interpretation or foreign constitutional texts and experiences in the process of constitution making. The globalization of the practice of modern constitutionalism has had a dramatic impact on the legal academy, reinvigorating the study of comparative constitutional law. However, despite

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